[perlgeek]

My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago.

Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.

[turbonoobie]

It's important to note that "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk" are only written forms of the language, and depending on where you grow up the dialect of Norwegian you speak will be closer to "Bokmål" or "Nynorsk".

If I remember correctly from Norwegian classes growing up, Bokmål is heavily influenced by written Danish. Nynorsk was based on dialects people spoke outside of the bigger cities. Nynorsk however is more of an amalgamation of dialects, and can not be said to be spoken by anyone. Your estimation is in the neighborhood of native writers of Nynorsk I believe.

[NorwegianDude]

People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.

[Sesse__]

There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the country of Norway, but written nynorsk generally prefers “Noreg”.)

Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )

[Tor3]

As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him. Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now. In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.

[actionfromafar]

I think you are soon ready to be a middle school teacher! Keep the trauma alive. :D

[perlgeek]

Well, as a foreigner, if you want to learn "the language", you have to start with something.

Since the majority speak some dialect of bokmål, and most courses teach it, that's what you end up with.

I watch some series in Norwegian, e.g. Ragnarok. I understood most of it, though some of the dialects were kinda hard to understand.

But it seems a moot point, basically nobody in any language speaks the "high" language, but some kind of dialect version of it.

[Tor3]

Again, it's not a dialect of bokmål. That would sound like bokmål is actually a spoken language and there are dialects of it. It is not. It's the other way around - bokmål is an attempt to create a written language with common elements for a lot of people, and the same was done for nynorsk - it's just that for bokmål the selection was more from certain city areas in the south, and nynorsk more from dialects elsewhere, but that's actually a too easy description. In my own dialect, which originates very far from where bokmål was created, there are tons of similarities but also tons of differences, and the same can be said for just about every dialect.

When teaching Norwegian to foreigners there's really only one practical way of doing that - use an artificial "spoken" bokmål so that the students can actually match speech to written words. That's just a crutch in order to learn the language (after you're done the real learning starts). That doesn't mean that "spoken" bokmål (or nynorsk for that matter) is real outside the learning institution.

[actionfromafar]

I think the fact that Norway has two standardised written forms makes you think a lot more about the discrepancy between written and spoken language.

English, say, also has many spoken forms but more or less one written form.

If you learn written English and then move to the Highlands or Australia you are also in for some heavy learning.

[vintermann]

Oh, they have many languages with smaller text corpora than Nynorsk, and they're not exploiting language similarity very well.

Probably they had that one Norwegian employee who struggled with it in school and came to hate it as a result (you'll find plenty of them in this thread).